M1 Mac slow simultaneous plot times

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1

hi,

I have an M1 Mac with:
16GB memory
2TB Sabrent nvme in an orico thunderbolt enclosure

and when I plot 4 at once, I’m getting slow plot times - around 35K seconds.

I’m staggering the plots, so there is only ever 1 in phase 1, I’ve tried 2,4,6 threads - but they don’t seem to make a difference. I’ve also tried buffer sizes 3072 and 4600, neither seems to impact the plot times. (Oh, and I’m using the apple silicon build)

I’ve seen a couple of people in these forums that seem to have much faster speeds 20K with 4 plots at once.

I’ve disabled FileVault, I’ve made sure the temp dirs are excluded from spotlight.

Any ideas?

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2

Have you tried doing just 2 simultaneous insteand and seeing if that works better?

3

I’m doing 6 plots at once with basically the same set up as you. Here are some screenshots for reference.

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image1522×194 92.2 KB

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image1518×202 92.6 KB

Here are my plotman settings:

scheduling:
tmpdir_stagger_phase_major: 2
tmpdir_stagger_phase_minor: 1
tmpdir_stagger_phase_limit: 3
tmpdir_max_jobs: 8
global_max_jobs: 8
global_stagger_m: 20
polling_time_s: 20

plotting:
k: 32
e: False # Use -e plotting option
n_threads: 4 # Threads per job
n_buckets: 128 # Number of buckets to split data into
job_buffer: 3389 # Per job memory

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4

Having said that, I’ve been doing some research tonight and as a result of others’ success I’ve set one M1 Mini to max 4 plots with more threads and RAM. Will report back.

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5

Hi ajca,

What was the outcome?

7

Hi,

I have similar setup and considering adding second M1 with 16GB to work in conjunction with my existing M1 rig with 970 EVO Plus 2TB in Sabrent enclosure model EC-SNVE. I currently settled on 5 plots but will attempt 7 in parallel mid-week.

I’m using the native M1 plotter and each plot is set to use 4000 ram and 4 threads with 180min delay. My target is 5 plots in the morning, 5 afternoon, and 5 evening approximately 15 as target ~24 hours.

I’m curious how folks are handling the excessive heat? It seems to also be challenge. I wedged my NVMe in-between ice packs and tried fans too. Any other alternate suggestions?

8

System processes are probably being throttled, causing excessive writes and slowing plot times. You can check Activity Monitor during plotting to see what’s getting in the way. You could try a manual fan control app like TG Pro - Temperature monitoring & fan control to cool things down and reduce throttling.

Running natively using the git install rather than through Rosetta on the GUI could also speed things up for you a fair bit.

9

Okay, Thank you! It seems I also had a bottle neck with the previous cables. I mistakenly grabbed the 10GB enclosures initially instead of Thunderbolt 3 enclosures below:

  • 1x OWC Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3

  • 2x Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 enclosure 40gb

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